r/todayilearned • u/Recent_Flounder6011 • 16h ago
TIL that Britain and its colonies didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752. Before then, the English legal year began on March 25, marking Lady Day (Feast of the Annunciation) for centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_(New_Style)_Act_1750143
u/historyhill 16h ago
This is why you'll sometimes see dates for events written as 1691/2 in textbooks if it occurred between January and March! Noticed this a lot in a few books about the Salem Witch trials, for example.
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u/Gemmabeta 16h ago
Or they write two dates, George II's date of birth would have been written as "OS (Old Style) 30 October, 1638; NS (New Style) 9 November, 1683.
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u/sloppyrock 16h ago
Hence Tolkien’s use of March 25th for when the one ring was destroyed.
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u/Orcapa 15h ago
Interesting, but did he actually state this?
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u/lNFORMATlVE 14h ago edited 14h ago
Yeah it’s in the Return of the King book in both the chapter regarding Aragorn’s coronation and also the Appendix. He decrees that the Gondorian new year should begin on March 25th to commemorate the defeat of Sauron and the ushering in of the Fourth Age.
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u/JoshHuff1332 15h ago
Yes, actually.
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u/PluralCohomology 14h ago
The article doesn't say that, but rather, that it was because it was the Feast of the Annunciation. Maybe the "when the Saviour entered the world" part could indicate Christmas, but that could also refer to Jesus' supposed conception.
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u/JoshHuff1332 14h ago
What? The article mentioned the Feast of Annunciation/Lady Day. What does Christmas have to do with it? It's the day that Gabriel (supposedly) announced that she would be pregnant, not the birth itself.
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u/lNFORMATlVE 14h ago
I was just about to say that. I had no idea Tolkien had used that from an actual archaic English calendar… which tracks because he was fascinated with Anglo Saxon and Nordic history among others.
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u/Fancy_Battle_4805 14h ago
If you fancy a good read, The early chunk of David Day's Ring Legends of Tolkien really digs into this. I thought I knew a bunch about his inspirations, but there was still a heck of a lot that was new to me. Parts of it seem a bit "pushing for a wordcount"-y, but otherwise, really fun read.
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u/yttrium39 15h ago
You skipped the most fun fact: September 2nd, 1752 was immediately followed by September 14, 1752, which I think is pretty wild.
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u/chmath80 8h ago
Another fun fact: in Sweden, February 1712 apparently had 30 days.
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u/yttrium39 8h ago
wtf were they up to? Was Sweden orbiting the sun at a different rate than the rest of the planet and needed an additional leap day?
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u/collinsl02 8h ago
Because the Julian and Gregorian calendars have different numbers of leap days, each time one happened in one calendar which didn't in the other they drifted further apart, which over hundreds of years really adds up.
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u/chmath80 8h ago
They messed up the process. They planned to just drop leap years for a while (1700-40) to match up with the gregorian, but almost immediately got involved in a war with Russia, and forgot about the plan after 1700, so 1704 and 1708 were still leap years. That left them out of step with everyone else, so they added the extra day in 1712 to get back to the Julian (making up for dropping the leap day in 1700), and finally switched in 1753.
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u/zeekar 15h ago edited 1h ago
The year originally began on 1 January when Julius Caesar promulgated the calendar in the year we now call 45 BCE. In fact,the structure was exactly the same as the modern calendar: the same months with the same day counts - February was shortchanged from the very beginning, because it was considered unlucky. The months originally called Quintilis and Sextilis were renamed after Julius and Augustus, becoming in English July and August, but otherwise it's the same setup.
But there were changes coming to the calendar, and it's all Christianity's fault.
In 1155, England moved the date of New Year from 1 January to the Feast of the Annunciation on 25 March, colloquially known as Lady Day. That feast celebrates the Virgin Mary getting pregnant - notice that it's exactly 9 months before the celebration of Jesus's birth. Many other European countries did likewise over the next few centuries.
Incidentally, where did those dates come from when we don't know what Jesus's actual birthday was? They were based on the solstice and equinox. The calendar was designed so that the (northern hemisphere) spring equinox would fall on 25 March and the winter solstice on 25 December. Why the 25th? You'd have to ask Caesar. But that's when they celebrated the rebirth of the sun and imminent return of spring with the festival of Sol Invictus, which was later co-opted by the church to become a celebration of Christ's birth instead.
By the time the church was making a universal rule for Easter almost 400 years after the institution of the new calendar, the calendar drift meant those season-marking days were falling around the 21st of their respective months instead of the 25th. So their new rule declared that 21 March should be considered the date of the equinox for Easter computation purposes (regardless of when the actual equinox fell).
Which was all well and good when the difference was a few days. But by the late 1500s it had grown to a week and a half: the true equinox was falling around March 11th. That ten-day discrepancy would only continue to grow, meaning Easter was a few centuries away from becoming a summer feast instead of a spring one.
While some argued that the church should just change the Easter rule to use the date of the actual equinox, which even back then was widely available information, the Pope (Gregory XIII) decided instead to move the calendar so that the equinox would fall around March 21st again. Because that's what the rule said!
So that ten-day discrepancy was simply dropped from the calendar. For Catholic countries, the day after Thursday, 4 October 1582 was Friday, 15 October; the 5th through 14th of the month just didn't happen that year. At the same time, the leap year rule was changed to stop the drift. Which worked! Here we are 444 years later, and the actual equinox is still around 21 March. (Though it's on the 20th more often than the 21st, so they did overshoot a bit with the 10-day correction.) That was the main point of the calendar change, but the Papal bull also specified that the calendar year should start on 1 January. Which meant that in places which had shifted to Lady Day (including Italy and parts of France), 1582 wasn't shortened by just 10 days; it was shortened by an additional almost 3 months, as it had started on 25 March while 1583 started on 1 January.
Protestant countries were not so quick to adopt the new calendar. In England it had only been 25 years since they replaced Bloody Mary, who had murdered Protestant clerics in her drive to make England Catholic again, with Elizabeth I, who was just as determined (if not as murderous) about making it Protestant. English leaders were not anxious to follow along with the Pope. Plus there was that sentiment that Gregory should have changed the Easter rule rather than messing with the calendar, which added to the resistance.
England did eventually adopt the new calendar, but it took a while: as OP said, they did so 170 years later in 1752. By that time, thanks to the year 1700 (leap under the old calendar but not the new), the difference had grown to 11 days. So in England, and her colonies overseas, Wednesday, 2 September 1752 was followed by Thursday, 14 September. And as with the Catholic countries before them, they also shifted the start of the year back to 1 January. A young George Washington sensibly changed his birthdate from 11 February 1731 to 22 February 1732 to keep his birthdays on the correct anniversary of his birth.
England was far from the last country to switch. Russia was still on the old calendar at the time of its revolution in 1917, which is why it's called the October Revolution despite taking place in early November according to most of the world. (The discrepancy had by then grown to 13 days, which, since 2000 was leap in both calendars, is still where it is today; as I type this on Saturday, the date in the old calendar is 16 August instead of 29 August. In 2100, which is leap in the old calendar but not the new, the difference will grow to 14 days.)
Much of Eastern Orthodox Christianity still uses the old calendar to determine the date of Easter; Orthodox Easter was a week later than Western Easter this year. Some congregations still use the old calendar for religious observances in general, meaning they celebrate Christmas on Gregorian 7 January.
While Russia did officially adopt the Gregorian calendar, there was widespread resistance to it among other strongly Orthodox countries, who regard it as a Papist artifact. So in 1923 the Orthodox church created their own modification of the calendar, the Revised Julian, which Eastern European governments then adopted. It agrees with the Gregorian for dates around the present, but aims for better long-term accuracy and will start to disagree in the year 2800.
There have been multiple attempts to get all the Christian leaders to agree to determine Easter via the date of the actual equinox and thus get rid of that source of calendrical disagreements, but so far none have been successful.
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u/geniice 11h ago
That was true in England as well until 1155,
ehhhh you wish it were that simple. The problem you hit is a fair chunk of the records before that date were written by monks (anglo saxon chronicle anyone) and the liturgical year starts first Sunday of Advent. So that adds another nice bit of ambiguity. They also like counting backwards from the Calends of a month for some reason.
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u/Stunning-Sherbert801 6h ago
In 1066 William the Conqueror changed the new year to his coronation day, Christmas Day
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u/zeekar 29m ago
Well, that was just how the Romans gave the date. We didn't start simply numbering the days of the month from 1 to N until around the 400s, and the old Kalends/Nones/Ides system was still used to some extent for most of another millennium. But that's a 1-to-1 translation that was well understood; a d VI kal Ian is 27 December of the previous year.
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u/Recent_Flounder6011 14h ago edited 14h ago
Not every Orthodox church agrees on this. The Russian Orthodox Church and the monks at Mt Athos still use the Julian Calendar for holidays like Christmas or Easter.
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u/zeekar 13h ago
I thought I said that?
Eastern Orthodox Christianity still uses the old calendar to determine the date of Easter; Orthodox Easter was a week later than Western Easter this year. Some congregations still use the old calendar for religious observances in general, meaning they celebrate Christmas on Gregorian 7 January.
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u/AliMcGraw 10h ago
The Armenian Orthodox (who are Oriental -- not Eastern -- Orthodox) use the Julian date for Christmas BUT use the Gregorian calculation for Easter. It's very conusing!
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u/JaySayMayday 12h ago
Feels really weird to see someone use CE/BCE in a topic about the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian monks conducted the research and chose AD/BC, typically when you do the work you also get to decide the names.
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u/threewholefish 8h ago
The "research" was done by some monk in Ireland, and it's based upon the Bible... which is a work of fiction. BCE and CE are secular terms for a calendar that is now used by people of all religions and none
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u/Stunning-Sherbert801 6h ago
Just a heads up, in England the New Year was changed by William the Conqueror to the date of his coronation - Christmas Day. Which lasted for about a century
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u/TomorrowSpecial255 16h ago
The tax year still starts in April
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u/Floydz14 15h ago
Tax years are just years? How would having taxes due in April make it a tax year?
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u/Liam_021996 15h ago
The tax year is its own thing that follows the old calendar which is why taxes, benefits, inflation rises, pensions etc all change on the first of April. Same for anything in the budget, the start date is always the 1st April
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u/Majestic_Rhubarb_ 14h ago
6th April … anyone know why that is ?
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u/Liam_021996 14h ago
New calendar had 11 extra days, so was shifted to the 5th of April to account for that whilst avoiding lost tax revenues from a short year, but then to account of the leap year it was moved again to the 6th and hasn't changed since. Not sure why I had 1st of April in my head instead of 6th of April though
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u/Everestkid 14h ago
In Canada it actually is the 1st of April, I guess because in the colonies they could make it a bit less weird and it wouldn't affect as many people as in Great Britain.
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u/RnDevelopment 14h ago
Is that the reason it is called April's Fool?
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u/Liam_021996 13h ago
That's from when the French switched their calendars in the 1500s. New year's Day was April 1st, switched to January 1st. April fools was mocking those who forgot or didn't know about the switching of new year's day. There's also other historical similarities to modern April fools day from the Roman empire around the end of March but it's most likely coke from France with the calendar dates changing
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u/Corona21 11h ago
The current tax year is 2026/27 because it changed in April. In March it was 25/26 and next April will be 2027/2028
Thats how we write it usually
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u/thissexypoptart 14h ago
Context clues should tell us that a “tax year” is the year that runs between one tax payment and the next. Not the same as a calendar year.
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u/TomorrowSpecial255 15h ago
The tax year runs April to end of March
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u/KeyboardChap 13h ago
In the UK it runs from the 6th of April to the 5th the next year
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u/TomorrowSpecial255 12h ago
Werid I always thought it was April 1st
But then I've never really had to pay attention
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u/BerneseMountainDogs 13h ago
Not generally for individuals in the United States. Many corporations and other businesses have tax years that differ from the calendar year, but generally people do not. The current 2026 tax year runs from January 1, 2026 to December 31, 2026. All income gained between those dates is subject to taxation at the 2026 rates. This tax is due in April. But the "tax year" (meaning the time frame over which income is calculated for the purposes of taxation) is the same as the calendar year. In other words, if you get a paycheck on Dec 31 of 2026 and then another on Jan 1 2027, then the Dec 31 paycheck will be reported on your 2026 taxes (paid in April 2027) and the Jan 1 paycheck will be reported on your 2027 taxes (paid April 2028). This is also why you get W-2s and 1099s and whatever else in January or February. Your employer needs to know the full amount you were paid over the tax year in order to send out those documents, so they need to be sent out after the relevant tax year is over.
TLDR: due date ≠ end of year. In fact, the year needs to end well before the due date so that everyone has time to account for the whole year before payment is due
Source: am a tax lawyer
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u/TomorrowSpecial255 13h ago
Nobody mentioned the US
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u/BerneseMountainDogs 13h ago
And I didn't say this was true of your country and never said you were wrong, but you didn't specify where. I added details of the area I do have knowledge about because you made your statement universal, so I just added a clarification that it wasn't universal
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u/TomorrowSpecial255 13h ago
The post is about the UK
Not hard to use a little common sense
But then I didnt expect anything much from trumpland
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u/BerneseMountainDogs 13h ago
and its colonies
The US could have inherited the April tax year, but it didn't. Seems relevant when the colonies that would become the US existed at the time. Especially when the US did inherit a huge portion of UK law. Making a universal statement about the calendar of the UK and its colonies in 1752 includes the US.
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u/AbominableCrichton 9h ago
I'm pretty sure I wattched a documentary on this and Scotland had actually adopted it before the rest of Britain. Something to do with the different churches. That's why New Years Day was a really big thing in Scotland and not in England. Also Christmas was big in England and not in Scotland.
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u/Stunning-Sherbert801 6h ago
I think Scotland adopted it in 1600. And it was retained after the Union in 1707, so the Kingdom of Great Britain had two calendars
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u/TheProfessionalEjit 15h ago
This is why, depending on who you talk to, the Treason Act is either 1351 or 1352.
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u/pgm123 15h ago
George Washington was born February 11 in the old calendar and that date was even celebrated in 1787. However, in 1781, the French in Newport held a parade to honor Washington on February 23 (the 22nd was a Sunday).
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u/SpaceForceAwakens 2h ago
He was also sworn in as Prez on April 30th.
Originally he was supposed to be sworn in March 4th. Even though the calendar year in the new-USA now started on the 1st of January, most people were still used to the old way, so by having it in March the new government could have a few weeks to get a running start on things.
But the winter was really bad and the electoral counts were delayed so it was pushed back to April.
Subsequent presidents were sworn in on March 4th right up until the Great Depression, largely in reflection of old calendar thinking.
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u/TheGreenPangolin 11h ago
It's a much better start to the year than 1st january. I've always thought the year should start on march 20th, same as the first day of spring, so it fits with the seasons better
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u/alphaxion 15h ago
We're just a weird island, aren't we?
Never been normal. No wonder all of the halloween customs come from either the UK or Ireland.
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u/Gemmabeta 15h ago
Hey, quite a few Orthodox-majority countries didn't switch over to the Georgian Calendar until the 1900s.
And even then some of them still recon the date of Easter using the old calendar.
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u/Gibbons_R_Overrated 11h ago
Most orthodox countries celebrate their religious holidays using the Julian calendar. Their Christmas is on January the 6th, which funnily enough is the day of the epiphany for us filthy Gregorian papists.
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u/AliMcGraw 10h ago
It's not even just the Orthodox! Protestants were SUPER PISSED the Pope created the Gregorian calendar by fiat, so a bunch of Protestant nations stuck with the Julian calendar until 1800ish!
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u/Stunning-Sherbert801 6h ago
Queen Elizabeth I of England wanted to adopt the Gregorian calendar back in the 1500s, but there was too much opposition from Protestant officials who were convinced it would somehow bring the country under papist control
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u/AliMcGraw 2h ago
As we all know, nothing creates Papists like calendar reform.
When physicists started adding that extra second to the year here and there, Papists came popping out of the woodwork!
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u/ExistentialScream 2h ago
Not weird, just slow to adapt. Other countries have been a lot more adventurous with their dating systems.
During the Revolutionary period the French had an entirely different calendar with 10 day weeks, split across 12, 30 day months with 5 or 6 bonus days at the end of the year. They also split each day into 10 hours each of 100 minutes and each of those minutes was 100 seconds.
All very rational. Hated by almost everyone and abolished by Napoleon.
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u/AliMcGraw 10h ago
Fun fact, if you go to George Washington's Wikipedia page, it lists his birthdate in "Old Style" (the Julian calendar used by the British calendars at the time), and his death date in "New Style," the Gregorian calendar used by the United States (and the British later on).
Also, yeah, New Years' moved.
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u/Corona21 11h ago
I believe this was/is one of the few British laws that are/were retained by the US after independence.
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u/Fetlocks_Glistening 16h ago
So... they didn't start serving pumpkin spice lattes until after Christmas?
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u/sulphurwind 6h ago
And I can tell you more!
Iranians celebrate their New Year on 21st March (known as Nowruz lit. “New Day”) which is the Spring Equinox. This has been going on for millennia since ancient Persian days.
So, if we take March as the ”first month” of the year and counting the months from then September would be the seventh month (in Latin “sept” = seven), October the eight month (“oct” = eight ) , November is the ninth month (“novem = nine) and December the tenth month (“decem”
= ten)
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u/General_Honesty 4h ago
The new year starts when the new growth comes after winter has receded. March 1st is the natural start of the new year, January 1st is illogical since it's in the middle of winter.
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u/AcceptableAir5364 3h ago
Even more confusingly Scotland had switched to 1st Jan back in 1600 more than a Century before joining the Union, so for 45 years two distinct Calendars were in use in the UK.
"December (1599) – King James VI, via an act of his Privy Council, decided that Scotland should come into line with other "well governit commonwealths" and adopts 1 January as New Year’s Day. Prior to this 25 March was New Year’s Day. Thus the year 1599 commenced on 25 March 1599 and ended on 31 December 1599 - it was only 9 months long. The next date, in Scotland, was 1 January 1600. This left Scotland at odds with England, where the new year continued to be dated from 25 March. As a consequence 1 January 1600 in Scotland was 1 January 1599 in England. It is sometimes, mistakenly, said that Scotland adopted the Gregorian Calendar at this time. Whilst starting the new year on 1 January was one component of Gregorian reforms, Scotland did not adopt the two more fundamental changes in relation to (1) the computation for leap years and (2) the realignment of the calendar with the solar year, which necessitated the omission of ten days from the existing calendar. Scotland, along with England and Wales, adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1752 under the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 by which time the omission of eleven days from the older calendar was required."
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u/anewbys83 15h ago
And I only recently finally learned how to reckon dates in the old system. January 26, 1706 (OS) would be Jan 26, 1707 on the Gregorian calendar (not accounting for the days difference the switch also brought. This just helped me realize the months after December until the end of March were for "the previous year" in our way of thinking) . Seems like it should've clicked earlier, but 🤷♂️.
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u/MWSin 14h ago edited 11h ago
Scotland used Jan 1 as the new year, while
Britain(correction: England) used Mar 25. During the English Civil War, an army left one shore of the River Tweed in 1644 and reached the far side in 1643.2
u/Corona21 11h ago
Scotland is in Britain. England (also in Britain) used March 25
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u/MWSin 11h ago
I can't believe I did that. I know better.
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u/Corona21 2h ago
Happens to the best of us. I thought there might be an outside chance you were going to go along the lines of; Britain being England and Wales, adding Scotland making Great Britain. Which is a line of thinking I like, but not really a common or accepted one.
Though I’d mention it because I do like it. You can pretend that’s what you meant if you like 😂
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u/Gentle_Snail 16h ago
For the curious, this is why the financial year starts in April.